Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (27 page)

And in the Dungeon, at the castle of N'wrbb Crrd'f and the Lady 'Nrrc'kth, men had fought with halberds and daggers and swords. Clive had done so himself. Even upon his return to London in the year 1896, he had carried a saber. Its intended use had been purely ceremonial, yet he had carried it with him, and in dire circumstances he had been willing to use it.

The troopers were swarming over the Ren ship, chopping and prying with their axes. Clearly, they meant to get between the metal plates of the ship-creature, to attack the softer and more vulnerable organic components that the metal plates protected. They pried between the plates with their axes while the Ren ship shifted its shape, snapping at them with its pincers. Whatever smith had provided these axes, making possible the astounding tactics of these warriors, must surely have been one of the primitive geniuses of all time!

The Ren ship extruded a new scorpion-tail. It emerged from between metal plates, shining and dripping fluids. It enlarged before Clive's eyes, slowly flexing, then curling, then flexing again.

The Ren ship used its new tail as a prehensile instrument and a stinger all in one, snapping at its attackers. At his side, Clive heard a horrified gasp as the new tail struck a bulky-suited trooper. The trooper was impaled on the barbed tip of the tail. Clive saw him fling his limbs out in a powerful convulsion of agony and death.

Now the Ren ship flexed its tail in a snapping motion, pulling the trooper with it, cracking the hawser that attached the trooper to the metallic ship as an animal-trainer cracks a whip. The trooper was flung away from the ship, tumbling and dwindling into the distance. For a moment Clive caught a glimpse of the trooper's belly, where the Ren ship's tail had torn away a segment of the trooper's suit, leaving a hole the size of a dinner plate.

The Ren ship's barbed tail was covered with gore, and the opening in the trooper's suit showed black and red. Clive prayed silently that the trooper had died instantly when struck by the barbed tail, and did not have to suffer the agonies of this moment.

But for all the effectiveness of the Ren ship's attack, it was a battle of one against many, and every bulky-suited trooper who was rendered
hors de combat
by the Ren ship was replaced by two more, furiously wielding their axes.

Now fluids began to appear on the Ren ship, horrid ichor flowing from between its metal plates. It was not the red of blood, but a hideous purplish color that made Clive gag once again. The Ren ship moved more slowly, its jabs and slices exerted more in self-defense than in the interests of its attack on the metallic ship.

More and more troopers swarmed onto the back of the Ren ship. The being's scorpion-tail flailed and struck, smashing another trooper with its heavy, barbed tip; A pair of pincers snipped off the head of a trooper, and blood spurted from the collar of his suit. But it was clear that the tide of battle had turned.

The Ren ship loosened its grasp on the metal ship and pushed itself away. A squad of troopers could be seen hacking with axe-heads at the hawsers that held them to the ship. They curved away from their ship, clinging to the Ren, chopping at it with their axes.

Clive saw the transparent globes that seemed to be the Ren ship's eyes swing open. From one of them gore spurted. But from the other emerged something pure white that writhed and spun as it tumbled through the blackness.

Like a squid spurting through the ocean, the white thing squirmed and slithered through the blackness.

As it moved away from the Ren ship, it headed directly toward the car containing Clive and Horace and Sidi Bombay.

As it approached the car it grew, and Clive was able to make out its shape in every horrid detail. Although it was as white as a field of fresh-fallen snow in the English countryside, it was identical in form to the black monster Clive and his companions had fought on the bridge at Q'oorna!

 

The white creature was hardly larger than an English spaniel.

It whirled past the car, swung back, grasped with writhing tentacles, and plastered itself to the outside of the car. Through the transparent walls of the car, Clive could see that no feature of the hideous monstrosity of Q'oorna was missing from this pallid miniature.

As the white monster pressed its top against the flat panel of the car, Clive could see that this included even the human face on the top of its trunk. Where the black monster of Q'oorna bore the incredibly enlarged visage of Clive's brother Neville, a visage that cursed him even as the monster plummeted from the high, basalt bridge, this white miniature bore another face equally familiar to Clive—and equally shocking!

It was the face of Annabella Leighton.

Clive's eyes bugged at the moment of recognition. He lunged across the car toward the white thing with Annabella's features. He pressed his own face against the cold, flat glass.

Yes, every feature, every line that marked Annabella was here. The softly flowing hair. The gently arched eyebrows. The eyes themselves, crying out with the depths of Annabella's love for Clive and the pain of his abandonment of her in her home in Plantagenet Court in London. The graceful, delicate shape of her nose and the generous fullness of her lips…

"Annabella!" Clive cried out.

He did not know whether the glass wall of the car would carry his words to her, but he pressed his ear to the glass in hope that she would respond.

"Clive! My darling!"

Yes! It was Annabella's voice, thinned and strained by the thickness of the glass, yet unmistakably hers.

"Let me in! Oh, Clive, I beg you!"

"Sidi! Horace!" He turned to his companions. "It is Annabella! Help me! We must admit her to the car!"

"No, Clive Folliot. It is not Annabella."

"It is! How this monster has gotten her, I cannot even imagine, but it is she! I know it is she!"

"It's a Ren, sah! They can do that, sah!"

"No! Horace, you must remember the monster of the bridge. It had my brother's face. Now this one has captured Annabella. We must let her into our car. We must rescue her."

"It's all a trick, sah. It's just the Ren."

"I know, I know!" Clive turned away from the glass, forcing himself not to look at the face of his sweetheart. "I know of these monsters. But how can I—?" He could not continue.

"Please, Clive," Annabella's voice came again through the glass.

Beyond the white thing with Annabella's face, Clive could see the heavily suited troopers, those who had survived the battle between the red metallic ship and the Ren craft. They had launched themselves and were floating toward the transparent car. They held their battle axes at the ready.

"Oh, Clive, do not leave me to die! Please, Clive! In the name of our common love! Please! In the name of our common humanity!"

Clive grasped the handle that would unlatch the door of the car and permit Annabella to enter. He tugged at it, struggling to turn it.

Horace Hamilton Smythe grasped Clive's wrist in both his hands. He tugged Clive away from the door.

"Smythe, what are you doing? Release me! If you will do nothing to help me to rescue Miss Leighton, at least do not interfere with my own efforts!"

Horace Smythe grasped Clive by the shoulders and shook him. "Get ahold of yourself, Major! You know that isn't Annabella. You know that very well, sah! You just said as much! You can't let her—it—in here. It can't be done, sah! We'd lose all our air, we should all die rather than one. But that doesn't matter, sah—that isn't Miss Leighton. I swear to you, sah, that isn't Miss Leighton!"

The troopers were close behind the white thing, axes raised.

"She will die!"

Like a man of two minds, Clive both knew that the monster was not Annabella, yet could not restrain himself from trying to save her. He very nearly succeeded in wrenching away from Smythe, but at the crucial moment, Sidi Bombay grasped Clive's other wrist. Together, the two men held him.

The first of the troopers was upon Annabella. She let go her hold on the glass of the car and pushed herself a few yards from it, ready to meet the trooper's attack.

The white thing was equipped with tentacles and claws and rows of fangs and venomous stingers, but instead of fighting the troopers, it merely waited for them.

At the first blow of an axe, the white thing bounded back toward the car. For a fleeting moment it regained its grasp on the car, pressed its trunk against the flatness. Again Clive found himself looking into the face of Annabella Leighton. "Good-bye, my darling," he heard the beloved voice whisper. "Even this, my love gives me the strength to forgive you, Clive. Even this."

With a maddened effort Clive broke free of Sidi Bombay and Horace Hamilton Smythe's grasp and lunged for the handle of the door. But even as he gripped the metal, a trooper was upon Annabella, his axe swinging.

The single blow split the white thing's trunk from top to bottom. Tentacles writhed, the mouth that Clive had loved opened and closed in a final scream of agony—a scream that was wholly silent—and gouts of ichor spouted from the two halves of the white thing.

The troopers continued to chop away at the pieces until the largest one remaining was smaller than the palm of a child's hand. Clive fell to his knees, convulsed by a dry retching as his empty stomach clenched and clenched again in horrified disgust.

"It wasn't Miss Leighton," Horace Hamilton Smythe told Clive again. "I didn't understand the Ren when we met that black giant on Q'oorna, Major, sah, or I'd have known that you was seein' yer brother's face and hearin' his voice. I saw another face, Major, back there on Q'oorna. When you saw yer brother, I saw me own ma'am. It was hard not doin' what she wanted."

"And I saw my own beloved child, Major Folliot," Sidi Bombay put in. "My child who had been taken by a tiger in the forest of Bengal—for whom I have never ceased to grieve, Major Folliot. The Ren have the power to summon from our minds the images of those whom we love. They use these images against us. But they are not real. They are deceptions, Major Folliot."

Clive wiped his watering eyes. "I know. I know that, Sidi, Horace. But still, seeing the beloved face, hearing the so-sweet voice—can you blame me, my friends, for—for a moment of confusion? For a moment of madness?"

"No sah. No one could blame you, sah."

"But we must come to terms, Clive Folliot, with the challenge that we face." Sidi Bombay pointed one finger, as if at a stain that needed to be removed from a garment. "We must not allow that moment of madness to persist."

"And if I had opened the door to her—to it?"

"Chances are, sah, we'd simply have lost all our air. Likely we'd have been swept out of the car, and died. Or else remained here and suffocated. Small choice, eh?"

"What filthy beasts they are! I thought the Ren were human—in our encounters with them in the Dungeon, as suspect as their motives might have been, at least I thought they were human."

"They take many forms," Sidi Bombay said. "But the form in which we first saw the monster upon Q'oorna, and the form of this small white Ren, seem to be their natural shape. I do not understand the differences in their size and coloring, Clive Folliot. But they are the true Ren."

A full dozen troopers by now surrounded the car, some of them floating as gently as gulls caught in an updraft, others grasping at knobs and protuberant features on the outside of the car to steady themselves. Now and then, a trooper would peer curiously through the glass at Clive and Sidi and Horace, but for the most part they simply went about their business.

Their business was the attachment of tether-lines to the car.

Before long the car was hawsered to half a dozen metallic craft. The troopers had departed, returning without a word of communication to their own ships. The fleet began to move, and with it, Clive could feel the glass car moving as well.

"Where are they taking us?" he asked his companions.

"I'd guess they're taking us to their home world, sah," Horace answered.

"To… Aralt? I thought Aralt had been destroyed, Horace."

"Yes, sah. Din't know the Major was aware of that, sah."

"I learned it on the eighth level. There was a woman, a beautiful woman. Her name was Lena."

"I quite understand, sah."

"No you don't, Smythe. She was a Chaffri woman, and from her I learned that their home was a tiny world located in the sun's asteroid belt. You thought I was unaware of the existence of asteroids—planetoids—but Lena told me of them. She told me that the home of the Chaffri was Aralt—had been Aralt—but that Aralt no longer existed. It was destroyed."

"That is correct, sah. But the Chaffri are not a minor power. They most surely have an alternative headquarters. They will have moved their operations either to that headquarters, or to some lesser outpost. Those are surely Chaffri ships, and I'd wager all I've got that they're taking us to their base."

Clive slumped against the cushioned back of the plush, padded, dark-red seat. He covered his eyes with his hands. It might have been better, might have been better, he permitted himself to muse, if he'd succeeded in opening the panel, letting the air rush out of the car, letting himself die in the moment of his reunion with Annabella. Of course, it would have been an illusion. If Horace and Sidi were right, if the white thing had been a Ren and if the Ren had the power to capture images out of their victims' minds and create convincing fancies of them… it might have been better to die.

"There it is, Sidi!"

Horace Smythe's voice interrupted Clive's reverie. Smythe stood at the now-useless controls of the car, pointing ahead. By looking around the car, Clive could see the metallic ships above and below, left and right of them. He could see the hawsers that connected the transparent car with the metallic ships, though the area behind each ship was distorted by the wavering pattern of its exhaust. The ships tugged gently, steadily.

Dead ahead of them lay a tiny disk, a perfect worldlet not significantly unlike the Earth, yet only a fraction of its size. Unsullied polar ice caps gleamed in the sunlight. Blue seas and green-forested continents could be seen through breaks in cotton-white clouds.